The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing: A Novel (21 page)

“Anyone have anything intelligent to say?” Mrs. Messina asked.

No one said anything.

Mrs. Messina sighed, crossing over to the photograph in three long strides. “C’mon, people. What do you guys feel when you look at this?”

“Scared,” said Missy Folgers. People laughed.

“Why are you laughing? She’s right,” Mrs. Messina said. “It is scary. Why, Missy?”

“I don’t know. The way he’s sitting, like he doesn’t notice anything else going on around him. Like he’s in another world.”

“A bad world,” someone said, and Amina stiffened.

“Exactly. And that’s what makes it beautiful,” Mrs. Messina said. “We’re looking at figures that seem isolated somehow, cut off from the rest of the world. What else gives you that feeling?”

“The porch light,” Tommy Hargrow said. “It looks too bright somehow. Which makes everything else look dark.”

Amina looked at the bubble of porch light, the shadows tucked around it.

“Exactly. Which, by the way, Amina, is why your mother isn’t quite in focus.” Mrs. Messina pointed at the blurred corner. “You probably would have gotten her if you had had just a little more light. My guess is she moved.”

Her mother? Amina leaned forward, squinted at the portion Mrs. Messina had motioned toward. There was nothing there. She scanned the newspapers on the floor, the door leading to the laundry room, the vigas, the fuzzy lines of classroom behind her father. Then suddenly,
sharply, as though the figure itself were rising from the paper, she saw the woman. She was standing in the corner, just behind her father. Amina saw the braid, the jasmine, the sari, the smile buried in her face, and knew she was not looking at her mother at all. She was looking at her grandmother at age thirty-three.

She had to show someone. Not her father. Or her mother. Definitely
not
Dimple. Amina paced the yellow lines of the parking lot, placing heel to toe to heel very carefully, waiting for Akhil. She was sweating. She looked at her watch. Half an hour late. She opened the notebook and peeked inside, both relieved and doubly nervous to find the picture exactly the same.

Maybe they could tell Thomas together. Or maybe they could tell Kamala first, and all three of them could show the picture to Thomas. And what would he make of it? Would he be relieved? Scared? Would he come home more or less?

Fifteen minutes later Amina sat on the hood of the car, watching a thin film of cloud traverse the southeast edge of the mountains. The windshield was hard against her back, the notebook warm on her lap. She turned toward the approaching footsteps. Akhil’s forehead creased like a Chinese dumpling.

“It’s about time,” Amina said.

Akhil looked up at her, eyes glassy, face puckered.

“Are you crying?” She slid off the hood.

“No.”

She looked for the telltale bruises. “Did those guys beat you up again?”

“No! Jesus.” Akhil hunched his shoulders. He dug the keys out of his pocket, flung the door open, ducked inside, and slammed it shut. Amina watched him through the window. His mouth was twisting nervously. His nose was gleaming and viscous. He wiped a shiny trail across the back of his hand and unlocked her door. She sat down.

“I fell asleep and missed all my afternoon classes,” he said finally, his voice sticking in his throat. “Farber said if I did it one more time, I’d be suspended.”

“Suspended? For falling asleep once?”

“It’s been more than once.”

“Oh. Like, how much more?”

Akhil stared at his lap, and another tear worked its way out of his eye, falling onto his chinos. He brushed his cheek angrily. “He thinks I’m doing it on purpose. He said that if I thought he wouldn’t expel a National Merit Finalist, I was wrong. Motherfuck!” He was really crying now, his round shoulders shaking under his powder jacket, his head down on the wheel. He lifted it up just to ram it back down. The car keys slid out of his hand and landed on the floor mat with a soft clink.

“It’s okay,” Amina said lamely.

“On
purpose
? He thinks I’d …? Doesn’t he know that the only thing that’s going to make anything better is if I get the fuck out of here?”

“You won’t get kicked out.”

“FUCK!” He kicked the floor. The car shook. “FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!”

“Akhil, stop! It’s not going to happen! It’s …” She looked around the car, as though some piece of clear logic could be found on the dashboard. “He’s just trying to scare you. You know that. It’s a Farber power trip, man—don’t fall for that stuff!” The words felt ridiculous in her mouth, like she was telling a joke with a punch line she didn’t understand, and Akhil wouldn’t even look at her as he reversed and peeled out of the parking lot.

He was driving too fast for being on school property, but Amina knew better than to say anything about it, so instead she said a little prayer that they wouldn’t get spotted by Farber or, worse, his secretary, who loved reporting traffic violations. They caught air over the speed bump and landed with a thump that sent up a little cloud of ash from the ashtray. Akhil screeched to a stop at the gate.

“It’s going to be okay,” Amina said again, trying to sound a little more official this time, but all this did was make Akhil drop his head to his chest with a sticky gasp. From far away, the dotted line of oncoming traffic swooped toward them like a fleet of planes.

“I mean, you’ve got, like, a four-point-o,” she rushed on, not wanting
to see him cry. “You never skip school. Besides, Cheney Jarnet got busted smoking weed in the baseball dugout last year, and he didn’t get kicked out, right?”

Akhil said nothing, but let the car inch slowly toward the road.

“Akhil,” Amina said.

Silence.

“Hey!” She pushed his shoulder, and when he fell heavily against the wheel, her heart shot up like it was trying to knock her brain out. Little bits of static floated everywhere.
The wheel
, she thought,
turn the wheel
, but when she grabbed for it, the seat belt smacked her back. They continued to slide forward, the cars bearing down on them now, metal grilles gleaming like dog teeth. And everything around Amina felt slippery then, the cool metal of the seat belt clasp in her hand, the rubber mat under her feet, the white line on the road they were heading toward nose-first, like a puppy pushing its way onto a horse track. For one brilliant moment she saw how it would happen, how the cars would crack through Akhil’s door and send them up into the sky, how the world would flash through the windows, how the metal and glass would explode into a thousand spears launched from a Lilliputian army. And then the seat belt popped open and she was slamming her foot down hard on top of Akhil’s, bringing the car to a lurching stop just as the cars went by them, swerving and honking and releasing the smell of burning tires.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” she yelled, pulling the emergency brake with shaking hands and then scrambling back into her seat. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Across from her, Akhil was still, body wedged awkwardly over the wheel. Fear filled her lungs. She lunged at him, pushing him back hard until he hit the seat heavily. She put her hands on his face, his lips. Breathing. He was breathing. And sound asleep.

BOOK 4
YOU CAN ALWAYS COME HOME AGAIN

ALBUQUERQUE, 1998

CHAPTER 1

A
lbuquerque greeted Amina with a howling dust storm. Down below the plane, brown coils of sand snaked across the mesas and against the mountains, scattering with the shifting wind currents. They hissed against the windows in the descent, and Amina squinted and held her breath involuntarily as the sky faded from blue to beige. The plane slipped out from under her, and the woman on her side let out a gasp that smelled of white wine. The intercom clicked on.

“Ladies and gentlemen, please check to ensure your seat belts are fastened and your bags are completely under the seat in front of you,” said a calm, cheery voice. “It’s a windy day here in Albuquerque, and we’re going to be hitting a little turbulence on our descent.”

Thirty years before, Kamala and Thomas had arrived in a dust storm. Kamala still told Amina about it whenever she felt thwarted by the desert—when a drought shriveled her tomatoes or the mesas caught fire. Once, during a dry summer that drove bears down from the mountains and onto the freeways, she called at six in the morning:
That day we flew in, I looked down and everything everywhere was
brown, brown, nothing but brown! I had to walk all the way into the airport with my eyes closed!

Amina looked at the swirling ground outside her window and imagined her parents descending into Albuquerque, their eyes wide open, India’s monsoon season tucked behind them like a shadow. With Amina not yet born and Akhil in Salem for the eight months it would take them to make a home, it was the first time they had been alone in years. She imagined them coming in at sunset, their hands clasped in a way she’d never seen, their cheeks blazing with orange light. They weren’t distant or shy or awkward in her fantasy; they weren’t a few years into a marriage that Ammachy hadn’t approved of. Instead, they were young and in love and racing into a new country at twilight. They had things to whisper to each other as the plane descended.

“
Koche!
Here!”

Amina looked behind her to find Kamala struggling down the escalator in a pink cotton sari and running shoes, her huge black purse hoisted over one arm, hair hanging down her back in the single black braid she’d worn her entire life. Short, slight-bodied, and bobbing from side to side like a furious metronome, Kamala made her way across the floor, entirely unaware of watchers she left in her wake. Even now, well into her fifties, with a few gray hairs framing the smooth flute of her cheekbones, she looked girlishly pretty.

“I’ve been waiting upstairs ten minutes!” she shouted, grabbing Amina’s arm as though she might try to get away.

“That’s the departure zone, Ma.”

“So?” She looked Amina up and down. “You’re looking too thin. Not eating?”

“I gave it up.”

“What?”

Amina squeezed her shoulder, gently guiding her back toward the escalator. “Of course I’m eating. I just had dinner with Sajeev and Dimple last night.” She silently cursed herself as the information lit up her mother’s face.

“Well,
well
. And how is Mr. Sajeev?”

“Fine.” Amina stepped onto the escalator, and Kamala followed, springing forward gingerly, like a cat onto a pile of papers.

“He has some big job now, isn’t it? What, exactly?”

“I don’t remember.”

“I think computer programmer.” Kamala smiled.

Outside, the old orange Ford was being pelted on all sides by thick sheets of sand. They watched it for a minute, gathering their breath.

“Okay! Run for your life!” Kamala shouted, and they did, throwing the bag into the back and jumping into the front.

“Hoo! What a business!” she yelled when they’d made it inside, laughing as Amina slammed the door shut. She pulled out from the departure zone, cutting off an approaching car and waving benignly as the driver swerved around them, his middle finger extended. “So the Ramakrishnas want to see you tomorrow. Raj is making jalebis.”

Amina winced. “Why can’t we tell him that I don’t like them?”

“You loved them when you were little!”

It was Akhil who loved them, but saying so would hurt her mother in the way all mentions of Akhil hurt Kamala, the prick of his name silencing her for minutes or sometimes hours. “Well, I really don’t love them now.”

“Raj loves making them for you, and your father loves eating, so no big deals, right?”

Right. “Where is Dad, anyway?”

“Big case. Your skin is looking good. You’ve been using the Pond’s I sent you?”

“Wait, he’s operating?”

“What else would he be doing?”

“I don’t know. Resting?”

“He’s not sick.”

“He’s sick enough for you to ask me to come down.”

“I said he was
talking
, not
sick
. You’re the one who decided you needed to come down.”

Amina shook her head but said nothing. Why bother? Once rewritten, Kamala’s history was safer than classified government documents. The wind hit harder as they turned north. A few miles away,
the hospitals—part of the only cluster of buildings higher than ten stories in the entire town—rose up into the dirty air. Amina squinted at them.